New Desktop Experience - your feedback wanted!

[kcwebbah]

Hi Everyone

Dan here again from the Desktop team.  The latest version of the Desktop client (1.1.51) is rolling out now and contains a lot of changes, improvements and fixes.  Here’s a short highlight of some of the changes you may notice in the new version.

Playlist changes

• The ‘duplicate tracks’ dialog now correctly shows when multiple duplicate tracks are added to a playlist
• It is now possible to select multiple tracks and drag to library or add to library from the context menu
• Added keyboard interactions to playlist menu in the left sidebar
• Added sorting dropdown to all playlist pages
• Improved drag and drop performance on playlists
• Fix playlist not being played in the sorted or filtered order when playing from the header play button

Others

• Improved display of shortcuts on the Home page
• Added listening history stats to user profile page
• Improved restoration of correct scroll locations when moving back/forth
• Added ability to select offline storage location from settings
• Added ability to navigate to followers and following pages from the profile header

One  additional setting that I've seen some feedback on but unfortunately didn't make it in time for this release was the ability to change proxy settings.  This should be ready for 1.1.52.As always, please do ensure you’re fully updated and are running the latest version. We again thank you for the feedback provided.

Thanks,

Dan

[kcwebbah]

One additional annoyance I just discovered: after a playlist ends and it goes to [Playlist Name] radio, I can no longer see the previous or upcoming tracks by clicking the album art (bot left).  You now have to go to Queue to see upcoming and then History to see previously played..so frustrating!

[Hubo]

After trying the new experience, I thought it looked really good; a much-needed refresh. 😉 Much more streamlined and it fits in perfectly with the app on my iPhone and with the Web Player. I had quite some feedback about the new experience when I first tried it and now much has improved already which I’m really glad about. 

As always, it needs some time getting used to, but I quickly fell in love with how the visual elements are highlighted and how there’s more space for album-art and playlist covers.

Really curious to see what you guys think of this New Desktop Experience! Hope to see your feedback and I hope you’ll have a similar first impression! ✨

[intellix]

It's not that it takes some getting used to though. A whole way of using the application has been removed. The ability to go to an artist and scroll through every single song, ordered by release date and grouped by Album. Now you need to go into individual albums to play songs.

I could sit all day on an individual artists page and scroll up/down playing odd songs as I wanted but now I have to search for them inside album pages. The album pages were always there but I never used them.

Also bare in mind, the UI is now an exact copy/paste of every other service out there. The previous view was a differentiator and it's been thrown away.

I don't say: "I feel like listening to this whole album". I say "I feel like listening to various songs by this artist and I want to pick and choose them throughout the day as I please". I used search when I wanted to search for a specific song.

[ambershee]

I hate it - absolutely hate it, I actually came in here looking for a way to revert to the previous interface. The two biggest problems are the sheer volume of wasted space, and the accessibility of anything is worse than before since most things are hidden between layers of menus when they were previously just plain on the screen.

For example, if I browse to an artist, the huge banner takes up the entire top 1/3rd of the screen. The banner and the 'popular tracks' list doesn't even fit on a single 1080p screen.

Instead of being shown their discography, with a list of all tracks on a single page, there's now a set of four large tiles. I now have to click 'see all' to get the full list where I didn't need to before. This list is also large tiles; some artists have multiple versions of albums with different tracks on them - it's hard and sometimes impossible to distinguish between them because they have the same cover and largely the same title, and if the title is more than about 25 characters the name gets completely cut off (this is utterly hopeless). I then have to click again to open the album.

Spotify is a music player - nesting the actual music three menus deep is a UX disaster. It's totally unnecessary and makes everything far more difficult than it was before for no obvious benefit. Trying to listen to artists who release large numbers of singles or EPs rather than full albums is now practically impossible without creating a playlist to encompass their work.

Playlists and release listings suffer from the same problems, though not as bad. Where before both had a unified interface where you could see a list encompassing some 30+ tracks, with the title, artist, album, length, popularity all one one neat line, there's now less information split over the equivalent of around four lines thanks to all the empty space. It's less informative, harder to read, and spreads critical content over more space than before.

If I'm unable to revert to the old interface, I'll have to unsubscribe - I simply cannot use this interface the way it's set up, it just doesn't work for me at all.

[ImanisEgo]

Really dislike the update, removing the search bar was really dumb. Currently whenever I add a song to a playlist it adds it to the beginning of the playlist instead of the end like usual. On mobile when I add the song it goes to the end so I don't know what the decision was to change it on the desktop application at least try to keep things consistent. Another problem with playlists is using the search feature in the playlist to find a specific song. If I type the song name with a space nothing will pop up at all but when I type the name without a space it'll show just fine. Please give us an option to revert to the previous iteration or fix the problems such as the search bar and other concerns that people have.

[Windyce]

I don't hate it, I miss having all the album songs appear when I go onto an artists page but I can live with that. I preferred having all the songs show up at once so I could relative popularity per song at a glance.

But the color of the downloaded sign needs to go back to being green. You've trained us for ages that grey download sign means it isn't downloaded while green is downloaded. If I've downloaded something it should be in the green colour. I just had to redownload my 1500 downloaded songs

As an aside, the "I'm not a robot' captcha is obnoxious as all **bleep**. My verification keeps expiring, taking control away from typing. But it needs to be done to preview my post.

EDIT: The word I wrote that was bleeped was the christian hades. I hardly think that needed to be censored, as it now looks like I've done an actual swear rather than a blasphemy

[Windyce]

New problem - it used to save my sorting preference for my playlists. I have one which I just by date added so I can easily listen to my new favorite sons when I don't want to shuffle. Saves lots of scrolling.

Now after you leave the page and go back it is on the default sorting. I really don't want to have to keep enabling it. Particularly bad is if this behavior goes to the iOS which lacks a scrollbar entirely.

[RicoDG]

First of all, the new look looks nice.

Only in my first time experience I came across three simple problems right at the start.

I like the friends tab so I can see what they're listening to. The problem I'm facing here is that if I'm in my playlist and I want to use the scroll function on the right side of the screen, my cursor almost always goes a little to far and opens the friends tab.

The 2nd problem I have is this. In the previous version when you clicked on another tab, the tab you had open previously stayed on the songs you were looking at when you went back to the tab. Now if you go back to your previous tab it automatically brings you back to the top of the playlist.

The 3rd problem I have is this. In the previous version you could always search a new song in every tab. Unfortunately you can't do that anymore.

These were the first 3 problems I was facing... Hoping I don't face any more...

[RicoDG]

Also one more thing. Why is the tab with the liked songs of an artist gone?

[treeninja1999]

Not a fan of the new update. The connect to Facebook is obnoxious, please for the love of god remove it. The fact that when I hover over the area it covers up the scroll bar is beyond annoying for me. As others have stated, the volume slider is not nearly as smooth, and removing the search bar is stupid. I get that you want to update the platform, but don't do it for the sake of doing it! We're losing features, not getting any more!